IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Guha, R. | |
| The authoritarian biologist Seminar 466 - Reconciling the needs of man and wildlife in India | |
| 1998 Conference Proceeding | |
When India became independent, in 1947, it had less than half-a-dozen wildlife reserves; it now has in excess of four hundred park and sanctuaries, covering 4.3% of the country (there are proposals to double this area). Wildlife conservation controls big territory and is now big business too. Nor is this country exceptional in this regard. In response to a growing global market for nature tourism, and egged on by strong domestic pressures, other Asian and African nations have undertaken ambitious programmes to conserve and demarcate habitants and species that need to be 'protected for posterity'. One might, at a pinch, identify five major groups that together fuel the movement for wildlife conservation in the Third World. The first are the city-dwellers and foreign tourists who merely season their lives, a week at a time, with the wild. Their motive is straightforward: pleasure and fun. The second group consists of ruling elites who view the protection of particular species (e.g. the tiger in India) as central to the retention or enhancement of national prestige. Willing on this process are international conservation organizations, such as the IUCN and the WWF, who work with a sense of mission at 'educating' people and politicians to the virtues of biological conservation. A fourth group consists of functionaries of the state forest or wildlife service mandated by law to be in physical control of the parks. While some officials are genuinely inspired by a love of nature, the majority - at least in India - are motivated merely by the power and spin-off benefits (overseas trips, for example) that come with the job. The final group are biologists, who believe in wilderness and species preservation for the sake of 'science'. These five groups are united in their hostility to the farmers, herders, swiddeners and hunters who have lived in the 'wild' from well before it became a 'park' or 'sanctuary'. They see these human communities as having a destructive effect on the environment, their forms of livelihood aiding the disappearance of species and contributing to soil erosion, habitat simplification, and worse. Their feelings are often expressed in strongly pejorative language. |
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